Yall know what happened. I am not writing his name, I am not giving him power here in my space. He was a man full of hate and he gave that hate a voice with a gun. If you want to know about him google search I am not writing about him.
I will write about Stephen T. Johns.
He was a guard for 6 years at the Holocaust museum. He was liked but his fellow employees. He will be missed. And that is pretty much all we know. Nobody has talked to his friends or family or neighbors. We only have the most basic of info on Stephen. WTF!!!
But the hate monger, I could write a whole bio on just what I have seen on the news, but i am not gonna do that.
Goodbye Stephen and thank you.... I will call you HERO here!!!!!
8 comments:
Derrick, Thank you for doing this post. As a Black man, I stand up with you in calling Stephen a HERO !!
He was definitely a hero and my prayers are with his family and children.
He is so much more than a Hero...
So sad. You know I kept thinking he's my age, my age... and why aren't they talking about him? We heard all that stuff about Sully and his heroism for months, long after that airplane went down in the Hudson, but a black man gets bupkis? Some might say that's apple and oranges, but not in my book.
That ain't right.
What happened at the holocaust museum was absolutely terrible, don't get me wrong. And I would like to see more written about Mr. Johns. Would more have been written about him if he were white? Maybe.
But I think it's going a bit far to call him a hero. He didn't do anything. He died, and that's terrible, but it's not a heroic action on his part.
And why write so much about the killer? Because everyone wants to know if there's some way we could have predicted this; some way we could have prevented it. It does get sensationalized in the news, and I don't like that. But I do think it's very important that we try to understand what motivated him to do this so that we can prevent future atrocities like this one.
Didn't he die in the line of duty...like firefighters whom we always call heroes? How about the captain that landed the plane in the New York river...he was a hero forever, was he not just doing his job, i mean was he not trained to do the very thing he did?
I just think it is interesting whom we decide to label hero these days.
Firefighters, policemen and military go to their jobs every day with a high expectation of danger. For that, I consider them all heroes. Some of them go above and beyond the call of duty, making them even bigger heroes. It seems silly that newspapers don't call them heroes until they're killed.
Most security guards, by comparison, have a fairly low expectation of danger at their everyday jobs. I don't mean to downplay their importance at all, but I don't generally consider them heroes. (But of course they sometime do heroic things.) From what I have read, Mr. Johns did nothing heroic; he was simply shot.
I hesitate to call someone a hero just because they've been shot: That greatly detracts from the sorts of brave acts that make someone a true hero.
Please don't get the idea that I don't care that Mr. Johns has died: it's extremely tragic and unfortunate. I just don't think he did anything heroic.
To elaborate, I define a hero as someone who protects others in a dangerous situation by doing something most of us cannot or would not do.
The pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson is a hero because that was a dangerous situation and most of us cannot land a plane.
A police officer is a hero because he enters dangerous situations every day to protect other people, and most of us are not willing to enter dangerous situations that often.
Martin Luther King was a hero because he risked his own safety to protect others' rights during a dangerous time for those beliefs.
Mr. Johns was in a dangerous situation, but unfortunately didn't even have a chance to try to protect anyone and prove himself a hero.
But what about the other security guards at the museum. They were brave in that dangerous situation, and they immobilized the killer to protect everyone else in the museum. Most of us could not have done that, so I think that makes them heroes. Why haven't we heard anything about them?
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